Suppose that I have an open source project, which would be a good candidate for customers wanting paid support for it. Now since I have a day job, I won't be able to provide that support on a 9-5 basis. What I'm looking for is a company that I can sub-contract out that support job to. Ideally, the way the arrangement would work, is I'd put on my project's web site "Official support provided by ...", and that company would then handle all the support signups, contracts, and become familiar enough with the code base to provide a basic level of first/second level support. Then I, as the original developer, would be able to handle any escalations that require code fixes, or feature enhancements.
Does such a support organization currently exist? At least outside of the big ones such as IBM or RedHat, etc. Ideally the company would be able to take on multiple open source projects that would have a low sales volume, and would kick back a small percentage of the contract income back to the original developers (in return for the developer promoting the support channel via the project's web site, and handling the initial training / code updates, etc). If one doesn't exist, maybe that would be a good idea for someone's startup? I'm sure that there are a bunch of projects that are in the same boat as I'm in.
